Mary Wollaston by Henry Kitchell Webster

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MARY WOLLASTON

BY HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

1920

CONTENTS

I THE CIRCASSIAN GRAND

II SEA DRIFT

III THE PEACE BASIS

IV THE PICTURE PUZZLE

V JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT

VI STRINGENDO

VII NO THOROUGHFARE

VIII THE DUMB PRINCESS

IX IN HARNESS

X AN INTERVENTION

XI NOT COLLECTABLE

XII HICKORY HILL

XIII LOW HANGS THE MOON

XIV A CLAIRVOYANT INTERVAL

XV THE END OF IT

XVI FULL MEASURE

XVII THE WAYFARER

XVIII A CASE OF NECESSITY

XIX THE DRAMATIST

XX TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

XXI THE SUBSTITUTE

XXII THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

XXIII THE TERROR

XXIV THE WHOLE STORY

XXV DAYBREAK

XXVI JOHN ARRIVES

XXVII SETTLING PAULA

XXVIII THE KALEIDOSCOPE

MARY WOLLASTON

CHAPTER I

THE CIRCASSIAN GRAND

Miss Lucile Wollaston was set to exude sympathy, like an aphid waiting
for an overworked ant to come down to breakfast. But there was no
sympathizing with the man who came in from a doctor's all-night vigil
like a boy from a ball-game, gave her a hard brisk kiss on the
cheek-bone, and then, before taking his place at the table, unfolded the
morning paper for a glance at the head-lines.

If there was something rigorous about the way she lighted the alcohol
lamp under the silver urn and rang for Nathaniel, the old colored butler,
it was from a determination not to let this younger brother of hers put
her into a flurry again as he so often did. A very much younger brother
indeed, he seemed when this mood was on him.

Miss Wollaston was born on the election day that made James Buchanan
president of the United States and Doctor John within a few days of
Appomattox. But one would have said, looking at them here at the
breakfast table on a morning in March in the year 1919, that there was a
good deal more than those ten years between them. He folded his paper and
sat down when the butler suggestively pulled out his chair for him and
his manner became, for the moment, absent, as his eye fell upon a letter
beside his plate addressed in his daughter, Mary's, handwriting.

"I want a big platter of ham and eggs, Nat, sliced thick. And a few of
Lucartha's wheat cakes." He made some sort of good-humored, half
articulate acknowledgment of the old servitor's pleasure in getting such
an order, but one might have seen that his mind was a little out of
focus, for it was not exactly dealing with the letter either. He sliced
it open with a table knife with the precise movement one would have
expected from a surgeon and disengaged it in the same neat way from its
envelope. But he read it as if he weren't very sharply aware of what,
particularly, it had to say and he laid it beside his plate again without
any comment.

"Did you have any sleep last night, at all?" Miss Wollaston asked.

It brought him back like a flash. "Not a wink," he said jovially.

This was a challenge and the look that went with it, one of clear boyish
mischief, was one that none of John Wollaston's other intimates--and
among these I include his beautiful young wife and his two grown-up
children by an earlier marriage--ever saw. It was a special thing for
this sister who had been a stately young lady of twenty when he was a bad
little boy of ten. She had watched him, admiring yet rather aghast, ever
since then.

To the world at large his social charm lay in--or was at least
inseparable from--his really exquisite manners, his considerateness, the
touch of old-fashioned punctilio there was about him. His first wife
would have agreed with her successor about his possession of this quality
though they would have appraised it rather differently. Only this elderly
unmarried sister of his felt the fascination of the horrible about him.

This was to some extent inherent in his profession. He had a reputation
that was growing to amount to fame as a specialist in the very wide
field of gynecology, obstetrics and abdominal surgery. The words
themselves made Miss Wollaston shudder.

When he replied to her question, whether or not he had had any sleep at
all, with an open grin and that triumphant "Not a wink," she had a
prophetic sense of what was going to happen. She was going to ask him
more questions and he was going to tell her something perfectly ghastly.

She felt herself slipping, but she pulled up. "What's in Mary's letter?"
she asked.

She knew that this was not quite fair, and the look that it brought to
his face--a twinge of pain like neuralgia--awakened a sharp compunction
in her. She did not know why--at least not exactly why--his relation with
his daughter should be a sore spot in his emotional life, but she knew
quite well that this was true. There was on the surface, nothing, or
nowhere near enough, to account for it.

He had always been, Miss Wollaston felt, an adorer to the verge of
folly of this lovely pale-blonde daughter of his. He had indulged her
outrageously but without any evident bad results. Upon her mother's
death, in 1912 that was, when Mary was seventeen years old, she had,
to the utmost limit that a daughter could compass, taken her mother's
place in the bereaved man's life. She had foregone the college course
she was prepared for and had taken over very skillfully the management
of her father's household; even, in a surprisingly successful way,
too, the motherly guidance of her two-years-younger brother, Rush.
Miss Wollaston's testimony on these two points was unbiased as it was
ungrudging. She had offered herself for that job and had not then
been wanted.

Two years later there had been a quarrel between John and his daughter.
She fell in love, or thought she did--for indeed, how could a child of
nineteen know?--with a man to whom her father decisively and almost
violently objected. Just how well founded this objection was Miss
Wollaston had no means of deciding for herself. There was nothing
flagrantly wrong with the man's manners, position or prospects; but she
attributed to her brother a wisdom altogether beyond her own in matters
of that sort and sided with him against the girl without misgiving. And
the fact that the man himself married another girl within a month or two
of Mary's submission to her father's will, might be taken as a
demonstration that he was right.

John had done certainly all he could to make it up with the girl. He
tried to get her to go with him on what was really a junket to
Vienna--there was no better place to play than the Vienna of those
days--though there was also some sort of surgical congress there that
spring that served him as an excuse, and Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had
only herself to blame for what happened.

She had elected to be tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old
aunt to Vienna with a gay young father. John went alone, sore from the
quarrel and rather adrift. In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an
American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, and of
unimpeachable respectability. They were in Vienna together the first week
in August, 1914. They got out together, sailed on the same ship for
America and in the autumn of that year, here in Chicago, in the most
decorous manner in the world, John married her.

There was a room in Miss Wollaston's well ordered mind which she had
always guarded as an old-fashioned New England village housewife used to
guard the best parlor, no light, no air, no dust, Holland covers on all
the furniture. Rigorously she forbore to speculate upon the attraction
which had drawn John and Paula together--upon what had happened between
them--upon how the thing had looked and felt to either of them. She
covered the whole episode with one blanket observation: she supposed it
was natural in the circumstances.

And there was much to be thankful for. Paula was well-bred; she was
amiable; she was "nice"; nice to an amazing degree, considering. She had
made a genuine social success. She had given John a new lease on life,
turned back the clock for him, oh--years.

Mary, Miss Wollaston felt, had taken it surprisingly well. At the wedding
she had played her difficult part admirably and during the few months she
had stayed at home after the wedding, she had not only kept on good terms
with Paula but had seemed genuinely to like her. In the spring of the
next year, 1915, she had, indeed, left home and had not been back since
except for infrequent visits. But then there was reason enough--excuse
enough, anyhow--for that. The war was enveloping them all. Rush had left
his freshman year at Harvard uncompleted to go to France and drive an
ambulance (he enlisted a little later in the French Army). Mary had gone
to New York to work on the Belgian War Relief Fund, and she had been
working away at it ever since.

There was then no valid reason--no reason at all unless she were willing
to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it--why John should
always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary. It was a fact,
though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she
did not know it.

He answered her question now evenly enough. "She's working harder than
ever, she says, closing up her office. She wants some more money, of
course. And _she's_ heard from Rush. He's coming home. He may be turning
up almost any day now. She hopes to get a wire from him so that she can
meet him in New York and have a little visit with him, she says, before
he comes on here."

It was on Miss Wollaston's tongue to ask crisply, "Why doesn't she come
home herself now that her Fund is shutting up shop?" But that would have
been to state in so many words the naked question they tacitly left
unasked. There was another idea in her brother's mind that she thought
she could deal with. He had betrayed it by the emphasis he put on the
fact that it was to Mary and not to himself that Rush had written the
news that he was coming home. Certainly there was nothing in that.

"Why," she asked brightly, "don't you go to New York yourself and
meet him?"

He answered instantly, almost sharply, "I can't do that." Then not liking
the way it sounded in his own ear, he gave her a reason. "If you knew the
number of babies that are coming along within the next month...."

"You need a rest," she said, "badly. I don't see how you live through
horrors like that. But there must be other people--somebody who can take
your work for you for a while. It can't make all that difference."

"It wouldn't," he admitted, "nine times out of ten. That call I got last
evening that broke up the dinner party,--an intern at the County
Hospital would have done just as well as I. There was nothing to it at
all. Oh, it was a sort of satisfaction to the husband's feelings, I
suppose, to pay me a thousand dollars and be satisfied that nobody in
town could have paid more and got anything better. But you see, you never
can tell. The case I was called in on at four o'clock this morning was
another thing altogether." A gleam had come into his eyes again as over
the memory of some brilliantly successful audacity. The gray old look had
gone out of his face.

"I don't altogether wonder that Pollard blew up," he added, "except that
a man in that profession has got no business to--ever."

The coffee urn offered Miss Wollaston her only means of escape but she
didn't avail herself of it. She let herself go on looking for a
breathless minute into her brother's face. Then she asked weakly,
"What was it?"

"Why, Pollard...." John Wollaston began but then he stopped short and
listened. "I thought I heard Paula coming," he explained.

"Paula won't be down for hours," Miss Wollaston said, "but I do not
see why she shouldn't hear, since she is a married woman and your
own wife...."

Her brother's "Precisely" cut across that sentence with a snick like a
pair of shears and left a little silence behind it.

"I think she'll be along in a minute," he went on. "She always does come
to breakfast. Why did you think she wouldn't to-day?"

This was one of Miss Wollaston's minor crosses. The fact was that on the
comparatively rare occasions when Doctor John himself was present for the
family breakfast at the custom-consecrated hour, Paula managed about two
times in five to put in a last-minute appearance. This was not what
annoyed Miss Wollaston. She was broad-minded enough to be aware that to
an opera singer, the marshaling of one's whole family in the dining-room
at eight o'clock in the morning might seem a barbarous and revolting
practise and even occasional submissions to it, acts of real devotion.
She was not really bitterly annoyed either by Paula's oft repeated
assertion that she always came to breakfast. Paula was one of those
temperamental persons who have to be forgiven for treating their
facts--atmospherically. But that John, a man of science, enlisted under
the banner of truth, should back this assertion of his wife's, in the
face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, really required
resignation to put up with; argued a blindness, an infatuation, which
seemed to his sister hardly decent. Because after all, facts were facts,
and you didn't alter them by pretending that they did not exist.

So instead of answering her brother's question, she sat a little
straighter in her chair, and compressed her lips.

He smiled faintly at that and added, "Anyhow she said she'd be along in a
minute or two."

"Oh," said Miss Wollaston, "you have wakened her then. I would have
suggested that the poor child be left asleep this morning."

Now he saw that she had something to tell him. "Nothing went wrong last
night after I left, I hope."

"Oh, not wrong," Miss Wollaston conceded, "only the Whitneys went of
course, when you did and the Byrnes, and Wallace Hood, but Portia Stanton
and that new husband of hers stayed. It was his doing, I suppose. You
might have thought he was waiting all the evening for just that thing to
happen. They went up to Paula's studio--Paula invited me, of course, but
I excused myself--and they played and sang until nearly two o'clock this
morning. It was all perfectly natural, I suppose. And still I did think
that Paula might have sung earlier, down in the drawing-room when you
asked her to."

"She was perfectly right to refuse." He caught his sister up rather short
on that, "I shouldn't have asked her. It was very soon after dinner. They
weren't a musical crowd anyway, except Novelli. It's utterly unfair to
expect a person like Paula to perform unless she happens to be in the
mood for it. At that she's extremely amiable about it; never refuses
unless she has some real reason. What her reason was last night, I don't
know, but you may be perfectly sure it was sufficient."

He would have realized that he was protesting too much even if he had not
read that comment in his sister's face. But somehow he couldn't have
pulled himself up but for old Nat's appearance with the platter of ham
and eggs and the first installment of the wheat cakes. He was really
hungry and he settled down to them in silence.

And, watching him between the little bites of dry toast and sips of
coffee, Miss Wollaston talked about Portia Stanton. Everybody, indeed,
was talking about Portia these days but Miss Wollaston had a special
privilege. She had known Portia's mother rather well,--Naomi Rutledge
Stanton, the suffrage leader, she was--and she had always liked and
admired Portia; liked her better than the younger and more sensational
daughter, Rose.

Miss Wollaston hoped, hoped with all her heart that Portia had not made
a tragic mistake in this matter of her marriage. She couldn't herself
quite see how a sensible girl like Portia could have done anything so
reckless as to marry a romantic young Italian pianist, ten years at
least her junior. It couldn't be denied that the experiment seemed to
have worked well so far. Portia certainly seemed happy enough last
night; contented. There was a sort of glow about her there never was
before. But the question was how long would it last. How long would it
be before those big brown Italian eyes began looking soulfully at
somebody else; somebody more....

It was here that Miss Wollaston chopped herself off short, hearing--this
time it was no false alarm--Paula's step in the hall. She'd have been
amazed, scandalized, profoundly indignant, dear good-hearted lady that
she was, had some expert in the psychology of the unconscious pointed
out to her that the reason she had begun talking about Portia was that
it gave her an outlet for expressing her misgivings about her own
brother's marriage. Paula, of course, was a different thing altogether.

What a beautiful creature she was, even at eight o'clock in the morning
at the end of an abruptly terminated night's sleep. She looked lovelier
than ever as she came in through the shadowy doorway. She wasn't a true
blonde like Mary. Her thick strong hair was a sort of golden
glorification of brown, her skin a warm tone of ivory. Her eyes, set wide
apart, were brown, and the lashes, darker than her hair, enhanced the
size of them. The look of power about Paula, inseparable from her beauty,
was not one of Miss Wollaston's feminine ideals. It spoke in every line
of her figure as well as in the lineaments of her face; in the short,
rather broad, yet cleanly defined nose; in the generous width of her
mouth; in the sculpturesque poise of her neck upon her shoulders.

Paula's clothes, too, worried her elderly sister-in-law a little,
especially the house-dresses that she affected. They were beautiful,
heaven knew; more simply beautiful perhaps than it was right that
clothes should be. There was nothing indecent about them. Dear Paula was
almost surprisingly nice in those ways. But that thing she had on now,
for instance;--a tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over
her head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted
artfully here and there that it mightn't fly away. And a string of big
lumpish amber beads. She could have got into that costume in about two
minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it. From the
on-looker's point of view, it mightn't violate decorum at all; indeed,
clearly did not. But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn't been more or
less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about;
if she could have moved freely in any direction without an
admonitory--"take care"--from some bit of whalebone somewhere, wouldn't
have felt dressed at all. There ought to be something perpetually
penitential about clothes. The biblical story of the fall of man made
that clear, didn't it?

John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table and
held her chair for her. "My dear, I didn't know I was robbing you of half
a night's sleep," he said. "You should have turned me out."

She reached up her strong white arms (the tulle sleeves did fall away
from them rather alarmingly, and Miss Wollaston concentrated her
attention on the spiggot of the coffee urn) for his head as he bent over
her and pulled it down for a kiss.

"I didn't need any more sleep. I had such a joyous time last night. I
sang the whole of _Maliela_, and a lot of _Thais_. I don't know what all.
Novelli's a marvel; the best accompanist I've found yet. But, oh, my
darling, I did feel such a pig about it."

He was back in his own chair by now and his sister breathed a little
more freely.

"Pig?" he asked.

"Oh, because you weren't there," said Paula. "Because I didn't sing
before, when you asked me to."

"Dearest!" John remonstrated,--pleased though with the apology, you could
see with half an eye,--"it was inexcusable of me to have asked you. It
was a dull crowd from a musical point of view. The only thing I minded
was having, myself, put you into a position where you had to refuse. I am
glad you were able to make it up to yourself after."

"That was not why I didn't," Paula said. She always spoke rather
deliberately and never interrupted any one. "I mean it wasn't because the
others weren't especially musical. But I couldn't have sung without
asking Novelli to play. And he couldn't have refused--being new and a
little on trial you know. And that drawing-room piano, so badly out of
tune, would have been terrible for him. There's no knowing what he
mightn't have done."

John's face beamed triumph. "I might have known you had an unselfish
reason for it," he said. He didn't look at his sister but, of course, the
words slanted her way.

It was perfectly characteristic of Miss Wollaston that she did not,
however, make any immediate attempt to set herself right. She attended
first very competently to all of Paula's wants in the way of breakfast
and saw her fairly launched on her chilled grapefruit. Then she said, "A
man is coming to tune the piano this morning."

It was more than a statement of fact. Indeed I despair of conveying to
you all the implications and moral reflections which Miss Wollaston
contrived to pack into that simple sentence.

The drawing-room piano was what an artillerist would speak of as one of
the sensitive points along the family front. It had been a present to the
Wollaston household from the eldest of John's brothers, the unmarried one
Miss Wollaston had kept house for so many years before he died; the last
present, it turned out, he ever made to anybody. Partly perhaps, because
it was a sacred object, the Wollaston children took to treating it rather
irreverently. The "Circassian grand" was one of its nicknames and the
"Siamese Elephant" another. It did glare in the otherwise old-fashioned
Dearborn Avenue drawing-room and its case did express a complete
recklessness of expense rather than any more austere esthetic impulse.

Paula ignored it in rather a pointed way; being a musician she might have
been expected to see that it was kept in tune. She had a piano of her own
up in the big room at the top of the house that had once been the nursery
and over this instrument, she made, Miss Wollaston felt, a silly amount
of fuss. Supposedly expert tuners were constantly being called in to do
things to it and nothing they did ever seemed to afford Paula any
satisfaction.

The aura that surrounded Miss Wollaston's remark included, then, the
conviction that the drawing-room piano, being a sacred memory, couldn't
be out of tune in the first place; that Paula, in the second, ought to
have attended to it; and third (this is rather complex but I guarantee
the accuracy of it) the fact that it was to be tuned this morning, really
made it a perfectly possible instrument for Mr. Novelli to have played
upon last night.

John missed none of that. He hadn't been observing his sister during half
a century for nothing. He glanced over to see how much of it his wife
took in; but the fact, in this instance, was all that interested Paula.

"It was awfully clever of you," she said, "to get hold of a tuner. Who is
he? Where did you find him?"

"I found him in the park," said Miss Wollaston brightly, responding to
the little thrill you always felt when Paula focused her attention upon
you. "He was sitting on a bench when I drove by just after lunch. I don't
know why I noticed him but I did and when I came back hours later, he was
still sitting there on the same bench. He was in uniform; a private, I
think, certainly not an officer. It struck me as rather sad, his sitting
there like that, so I stopped the car and spoke to him. He got his
discharge just the other day, it seemed. I asked him if he had a job and
he said, no, he didn't believe he had. Then I asked him what his trade
was and he said he was a piano tuner. So I told him he might come this
morning and tune ours."

It was Paula's bewildered stare that touched off John's peal of laughter.
Alone with his sister he might have smiled to himself over the lengths
she went in the satisfaction of her passion for good works. But Paula, he
knew, would just as soon have invited a strange bench-warming dentist to
come and work on her teeth by way of being kind to him.

Miss Wollaston, a flush of annoyance on her faded cheeks, began making
dignified preparations to leave the table and John hastily apologized. "I
laughed," he said,--disingenuously because it wouldn't do to implicate
Paula--"over the idea that perhaps he didn't want a job at all and made
up on the spur of the moment the unlikeliest trade he could think of. And
how surprised he must have been when you took him up."

"He did not seem surprised," Miss Wollaston said. "He thanked me very
nicely and said he would come this morning. At ten, if that would be
convenient. Of course if you wish to put it off...."

"Not at all," said John. He rose when she did and--this was an extra bit,
an act of contrition for having wounded her--went with her to the door.
"It was a good idea," he said; "an excellent way of--of killing two birds
with one stone."

Paula was smiling over this when he came back to her. "It doesn't matter,
does it?" he asked.

She shook her head. "It isn't that it's out of tune, really; it's
just--hopeless."

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